Montparnasse's American eye — portraitist of the whole expatriate quarter, inventor of the rayograph, and maker of films (Emak-Bakia, L'Étoile de mer) that treated the camera as another darkroom.
Man Ray was the American photographer, painter, and filmmaker at the center of Dada and Surrealism in Paris. Born Emmanuel Radnitzky in Philadelphia in 1890, he arrived in Montparnasse in July 1921 as the closest ally of Marcel Duchamp from their New York Dada years, and within a few years his studio was where the quarter went to be photographed — Gertrude Stein, James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway, and Jean Cocteau all sat for him. Alongside the portraits he invented the cameraless rayograph, made four Surrealist films, and produced Le Violon d'Ingres, the 1924 photograph of Kiki de Montparnasse that set the auction record for a photograph in 2022.
He was born Emmanuel Radnitzky on 27 August 1890 in Philadelphia. The family moved to Brooklyn around 1897 and later shortened its surname to Ray; Emmanuel became Man Ray and kept the invented name for the rest of his life. After high school he turned down an architecture scholarship to paint, and supported himself in Manhattan as a commercial artist and technical illustrator. In 1914 he married the Belgian poet Adon Lacroix; they separated in 1919, though the divorce waited until 1937.
He met Marcel Duchamp in the mid-1910s in the small artists' colony at Ridgefield, New Jersey, and the two ran New York's Dada experiments together for the next half decade. Among their productions was Rrose Sélavy, Duchamp's female alter ego, whom Man Ray photographed around 1920.[1]
He reached Paris on 22 July 1921, and Duchamp introduced him to the Paris Dadaists on arrival. He settled in Montparnasse and stayed, with one long wartime interruption, for the rest of his life.[1]
Portrait photography paid for everything else, and the client list became a census of the quarter. In 1922 he photographed Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas beneath the paintings in the atelier at 27 rue de Fleurus; Stein's memoir The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas records the visits to his tiny hotel-room studio. The Getty's holdings of his portraits include Henry Miller alongside Joyce, Stein, and Pablo Picasso.[2]
In the darkroom in 1922 he began laying objects directly onto photographic paper and exposing them to light. Twelve of the resulting images were published that year as the portfolio Champs délicieux, with a preface by the Dada poet Tristan Tzara, and the pictures became known as rayographs, after their maker.[3]
When Surrealism organized itself out of Paris Dada, Man Ray went with it as the movement's house photographer. He photographed Gala Dalí, and one of the portraits appeared in Salvador Dalí's 1930 book La Femme visible.[4]
For most of the 1920s he lived with Kiki de Montparnasse, the artists' model and cabaret singer born Alice Prin, and she became his most frequent model. In 1924 he photographed her bare back and added the two f-holes of a violin to the print. The result, Le Violon d'Ingres, is his best-known image; in May 2022 a print of it sold at Christie's for $12.4 million, the record for any photograph at auction.
Lee Miller, a young American model who intended to become a photographer, arrived at his studio in 1929. For three years she was his student, collaborator, and lover, and together they reworked solarization — the partial reversal of tones that rims a printed figure with a dark line — into a technique both used for the rest of their careers.[5]
He made four short films of his own during the Paris decade:
He worked on other people's films too. In René Clair's Entr'acte (1924) he and Duchamp play chess on the roof of the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées until a jet of water sweeps the game away, and in 1926 he filmed Duchamp's spinning word-discs for Anémic Cinéma.[6][7]
The German occupation ended the first Paris period. He left France in the summer of 1940, reached the United States in August, and settled in Los Angeles for a decade of painting and teaching — he insisted throughout his life that painting, not photography, was his real medium. In October 1946 he married the dancer Juliet Browner in Beverly Hills, in a double wedding with Max Ernst and Dorothea Tanning.
In 1951 the couple returned to Paris and took an apartment and studio on rue Férou, a short street beside the Luxembourg Gardens, where he worked for another quarter century. He died in Paris on 18 November 1976, at eighty-six, and is buried in Montparnasse Cemetery under the epitaph he chose: 'Unconcerned, but not indifferent.' Juliet was later buried with him; her stone reads 'Together again.'
Around 1929, working with Lee Miller, Man Ray began using a darkroom accident deliberately. If a print or negative is exposed to a flash of light part-way through development, the tones partly reverse and a hard black line appears along every edge where light meets dark.[8]
The effect had been known to chemists since the nineteenth century as the Sabattier effect, and photographers treated it as a fault. Man Ray used it on portraits and nudes, so that a face acquires a drawn outline it did not have and the skin turns silver.
Miller's own account is that she caused the first one by switching the light on when something ran over her foot in the dark. Man Ray developed the plate anyway and spent the next several years learning to produce the accident on demand.[5]
Man Ray made things as well as pictures, usually in an afternoon and usually from something bought that morning.
Gift, made in 1921 for his first Paris exhibition, is a flatiron with fourteen upholstery tacks glued in a row down its face. Object to Be Destroyed, from 1923, is a metronome with a photograph of an eye clipped to the swinging arm. A group of students took the title literally at an exhibition in 1957 and destroyed it; Man Ray made another and renamed it Indestructible Object.
Man Ray built these things from parts anyone could buy, and he remade them when they were lost or wanted elsewhere. That was part of the argument: he had no interest in the unique handmade object, and editions of both Gift and Object to Be Destroyed have been issued since.
The portrait work paid the bills, and the fashion work paid better. From 1922 Man Ray photographed collections for the couturier Paul Poiret, and through the 1920s and 1930s he worked for Harper's Bazaar, Vogue and Vanity Fair.[9]
He did not treat the assignments as separate from the rest. Solarization, unusual cropping and the darkroom effects he had developed for Surrealist pictures went straight into the magazines, and the fashion pages of the 1930s carried avant-garde photography to an audience that would never have seen it in a gallery.[10]
He was also clear about the hierarchy in his own mind. He considered himself a painter who photographed, and said he photographed the things he did not want to paint.
Man Ray married Juliet Browner in 1946, in a double ceremony in Beverly Hills alongside Max Ernst and Dorothea Tanning.
He died in Paris on 18 November 1976, aged eighty-six, and is buried in the Montparnasse cemetery. Juliet designed the stone and chose the wording. It reads that he was unconcerned, but not indifferent.[11]
Juliet Browner spent the years after his death organising the estate, cataloguing the work, authorising prints made from his negatives, and placing pieces with museums.
Born Emmanuel Radnitzky in Philadelphia on 27 August; the family moves to Brooklyn around 1897 and later shortens its surname to Ray.
Arrives in Paris on 22 July; Marcel Duchamp introduces him to the Dadaists, and he settles in Montparnasse.
Makes Gift, a flatiron with fourteen tacks glued down its face, for his first Paris exhibition.
Publishes the rayograph portfolio Champs délicieux and photographs Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas in the atelier at 27 rue de Fleurus.
Begins photographing collections for the couturier Paul Poiret, and goes on to work for Harper's Bazaar, Vogue and Vanity Fair.
Makes Object to Be Destroyed, a metronome with a photograph of an eye clipped to the arm.
Photographs Kiki de Montparnasse as Le Violon d'Ingres, and plays rooftop chess with Duchamp in René Clair's Entr'acte.
Releases the cinépoème Emak-Bakia and films Marcel Duchamp's spinning discs for Anémic Cinéma.
Releases L'Étoile de mer, built on a poem by Robert Desnos, with Kiki de Montparnasse in the lead.
Completes Les Mystères du château de Dé for Charles and Marie-Laure de Noailles; Lee Miller becomes his student, model, and collaborator.
Begins using solarization deliberately, working with Lee Miller.
Carl Van Vechten photographs him in Paris with Salvador Dalí.
Leaves occupied France for the United States and settles in Los Angeles.
Marries the dancer Juliet Browner in Beverly Hills, in a double wedding with Max Ernst and Dorothea Tanning.
Returns to Paris with Juliet and takes an apartment and studio on rue Férou, beside the Luxembourg Gardens.
Students destroy Object to Be Destroyed at an exhibition. He makes another and calls it Indestructible Object.
Dies in Paris on 18 November, at eighty-six, and is buried in Montparnasse Cemetery under the epitaph 'Unconcerned, but not indifferent.'
A print of Le Violon d'Ingres sells at Christie's for $12.4 million, the auction record for a photograph.
Photograph
A close view of the upper half of a face, cut at the brow and again below the nose. The eyes look up and away to the right. Five clear glass spheres sit on the skin below them. Man Ray, born Emmanuel Radnitzky, made the photograph in Paris about 1932, and the J. Paul Getty Museum holds this gelatin silver print as 84.XM.230.2. The title is French for tears.
Photograph
A woman sits with her back to the camera, bare to the hips, her head wrapped in a patterned turban and turned so that only the edge of her profile shows. Two black violin f-holes stand on her lower back. Man Ray, born Emmanuel Radnitzky, made the photograph in Paris in 1924 with Kiki de Montparnasse, born Alice Prin. The J. Paul Getty Museum holds this 1924 gelatin silver print as 86.XM.626.10.
Photograph
A woman's profile enters at the left edge, eyes closed. To the right of it, filling most of the frame, two hands rise: an upper hand with the fingers spread, and a lower one closed around its wrist. A fine black line runs round every contour. Man Ray, born Emmanuel Radnitzky, made the print in 1932, and the J. Paul Getty Museum catalogues it as a solarized gelatin silver print, accession number 84.XM.839.5.
Photograph
A long sleeve of netting falls down a black field, ringed by a single looping wire and crowned with a mass of curled wood shavings. No camera was used and no negative exists. Man Ray, born Emmanuel Radnitzky, laid the objects straight onto photographic paper and exposed it to light. The J. Paul Getty Museum holds the print as 84.XM.1000.161 and calls it a large one, at 39.8 by 29.8 centimetres.
Photograph
Kiki de Montparnasse rests her head on a table, eyes closed, beside a black wooden mask that she holds upright. Man Ray made the photograph in Paris in 1926, and Paris Vogue published it that May as Visage de nacre et masque d'ébène. The title Noire et blanche came two years later. The Museum of Modern Art in New York owns this print.
Met · 1922
He photographed Stein and Toklas in the rue de Fleurus atelier in 1922 — the sitting preserved in our Stein timeline — and the Autobiography records the visits to his tiny hotel-room studio.
Partner of · 1921–1927
Partners for six years from late 1921. She was his model through the decade's most famous images, including Le Violon d'Ingres of 1924, the photograph of her back painted with a violin's f-holes.
Taught · 1929–1932
Miller went to Paris in 1929 specifically to learn photography from Man Ray, and the Lee Miller Archives list 'student' first among her three roles in the studio. The training was practical and mutual: it was her darkroom accident that recovered the Sabatier effect, which Man Ray named solarisation and both used for the rest of their careers.
Partner of · 1929–1932
Miller arrived in Paris in 1929 and became, in the Lee Miller Archives' words, Man Ray's 'student, model and partner'; they worked together in his Montparnasse studio until she left Paris for New York in 1932. The V&A credits the solarisation technique to the two of them jointly.
Painted a portrait of · 1935
Man Ray photographed Fini repeatedly in Paris during the later 1930s. Centre Pompidou holds and records several of the portraits.
Mentored · 1923
Man Ray wanted a darkroom assistant who knew nothing about photography, and hired Abbott, who was in Paris studying sculpture. She learned the process in his studio, and later wrote that she took to photography like a duck to water and never wanted to do anything else. He gave her the run of the studio for her own portraits, and she opened her first one in 1926.
Met
The American quarter's photographer and its most banned novelist, in one frame — Man Ray's portrait of Miller sits in the Getty's holdings among his sittings of Joyce, Stein, and Picasso.
Collaborated with · 1926
The Centre Pompidou credits Anémic Cinéma as 'réalisé par Marcel Duchamp avec Man Ray et Marc Allégret' — Man Ray filming Duchamp's turning spirals as an exercise in purely optical speed. The claim is scoped to the film; the friendship ran far longer.
Supported by
Charles and Marie-Laure de Noailles financed Les Mystères du château de Dé, shot at their modernist villa in Hyères — the Pompidou archive dates the shoot 1928 and the film 1929 — one of several film projects the couple paid for together.
Collaborated with
Gala sat for Man Ray. One of his portraits appeared in Dalí's 1930 promotional leaflet and book La Femme visible.
Collaborated with · 1926–1930
Cunard sat for Man Ray in 1926, for the portrait now at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in which her forearms are sheathed to the elbow in African bangles. He also made the cover for Henry Crowder's Henry-Music, printed by her Hours Press in 1930, and his work hung in the press's shop window on the rue Guénégaud.
Collaborated with
They had met in Paris in 1920, before either was famous for the work they are now known for. The house's catalogue of Schiaparelli's artist collaborations files six or seven works under Man Ray's name, including the spiral spectacles made for her and portraits of the couturière; the Musée des Arts Décoratifs lists him first among her key collaborators.
Collaborated with · 1925
Tanguy and Man Ray jointly made an exquisite-corpse drawing with Joan Miró and Max Morise in Paris in 1926–1927.
Met · 1924–1929
Crowley and Man Ray belonged to the overlapping artistic and expatriate networks of interwar Montparnasse; Churton describes their relationship as one of camaraderie during Crowley's Paris years.
Man Ray lived on Atget's street and collected almost fifty of his photographs into an album dated 1926. What he took from them was the uncanny in plain documentary: shop windows where reflections double the street, mannequins that look about to move, empty staircases. He published several in La Révolution surréaliste, among them Atget's photograph of a crowd watching the 1912 solar eclipse, in the issue of 15 June 1926. Atget asked that his name be left off, saying they were simply documents he made.
Art & literary movement · 1924–1966
A founder of New York Dada and a mainstay of Paris surrealism — the movement's house photographer, and a maker of its films.
Art movement · c. 1916–1924
The American wing's photographer and object-maker, close to Duchamp in New York before joining the Paris circle in 1921.
For his photographs of the Paris avant-garde of the 1920s and 1930s, for inventing the cameraless rayograph, and for single images like Le Violon d'Ingres (1924). He was also a painter, an object-maker in the Dada spirit, and the director of four Surrealist films, and he considered all of these one activity.
A photographic image made without a camera: objects are laid directly on photographic paper and exposed to light, leaving their silhouettes. Man Ray began making them in Paris in 1922 and published twelve that year as the portfolio Champs délicieux; the name is a play on his own.
His companion and most frequent model for most of the 1920s. Kiki de Montparnasse was the stage name of Alice Prin, a model and cabaret singer; she is the subject of Le Violon d'Ingres and appears in three of his films, Le Retour à la raison, Emak-Bakia, and L'Étoile de mer.
Emmanuel Radnitzky. He was born in Philadelphia on 27 August 1890; the family moved to Brooklyn and later shortened its surname to Ray, and Emmanuel worked under the invented name Man Ray for his whole career.
Yes. He directed four experimental shorts: Le Retour à la raison (1923), Emak-Bakia (1926), L'Étoile de mer (1928), and Les Mystères du château de Dé (1929). He also appears in René Clair's Entr'acte (1924), playing rooftop chess with Marcel Duchamp, and filmed Duchamp's Anémic Cinéma (1926).
A 1924 photograph of Kiki de Montparnasse's bare back with the two f-holes of a violin added to the print. In May 2022 a print sold at Christie's in New York for $12.4 million, making it the most expensive photograph ever sold at auction.
In Montparnasse Cemetery in Paris. He died in the city on 18 November 1976, and his gravestone carries the epitaph he chose, 'Unconcerned, but not indifferent.' His wife Juliet was later buried with him under the words 'Together again.'
A darkroom effect Man Ray began using deliberately around 1929, working with Lee Miller. Exposing a print or negative to light part-way through development partly reverses the tones and leaves a hard black line wherever light meets dark. Chemists had known it since the nineteenth century as the Sabattier effect and photographers treated it as a fault.
A metronome with a photograph of an eye clipped to the swinging arm, made in 1923. A group of students took the title literally and destroyed it at an exhibition in 1957. Man Ray made another and renamed it Indestructible Object.
Not primarily. He described himself as a painter who photographed, and said he photographed the things he did not want to paint. The portrait and fashion work paid for the painting, the films and the objects.
Met · 1922
He photographed Stein and Toklas in the rue de Fleurus atelier in 1922 — the sitting preserved in our Stein timeline — and the Autobiography records the visits to his tiny hotel-room studio.
Associated with
A founder of New York Dada and a mainstay of Paris surrealism — the movement's house photographer, and a maker of its films.
Partner of · 1921–1927
Partners for six years from late 1921. She was his model through the decade's most famous images, including Le Violon d'Ingres of 1924, the photograph of her back painted with a violin's f-holes.
Taught · 1929–1932
Miller went to Paris in 1929 specifically to learn photography from Man Ray, and the Lee Miller Archives list 'student' first among her three roles in the studio. The training was practical and mutual: it was her darkroom accident that recovered the Sabatier effect, which Man Ray named solarisation and both used for the rest of their careers.
Buried at · 1976
Buried in division 7 after his death in Paris on 18 November 1976, under the epitaph he chose: Unconcerned, but not indifferent. His wife Juliet was later buried with him.
Painted a portrait of · 1935
Man Ray photographed Fini repeatedly in Paris during the later 1930s. Centre Pompidou holds and records several of the portraits.
Mentored · 1923
Man Ray wanted a darkroom assistant who knew nothing about photography, and hired Abbott, who was in Paris studying sculpture. She learned the process in his studio, and later wrote that she took to photography like a duck to water and never wanted to do anything else. He gave her the run of the studio for her own portraits, and she opened her first one in 1926.
Associated with
The American wing's photographer and object-maker, close to Duchamp in New York before joining the Paris circle in 1921.
Met
The American quarter's photographer and its most banned novelist, in one frame — Man Ray's portrait of Miller sits in the Getty's holdings among his sittings of Joyce, Stein, and Picasso.
Collaborated with · 1926
The Centre Pompidou credits Anémic Cinéma as 'réalisé par Marcel Duchamp avec Man Ray et Marc Allégret' — Man Ray filming Duchamp's turning spirals as an exercise in purely optical speed. The claim is scoped to the film; the friendship ran far longer.
Supported by
Charles and Marie-Laure de Noailles financed Les Mystères du château de Dé, shot at their modernist villa in Hyères — the Pompidou archive dates the shoot 1928 and the film 1929 — one of several film projects the couple paid for together.
Collaborated with
Gala sat for Man Ray. One of his portraits appeared in Dalí's 1930 promotional leaflet and book La Femme visible.
Collaborated with · 1926–1930
Cunard sat for Man Ray in 1926, for the portrait now at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in which her forearms are sheathed to the elbow in African bangles. He also made the cover for Henry Crowder's Henry-Music, printed by her Hours Press in 1930, and his work hung in the press's shop window on the rue Guénégaud.
Collaborated with
They had met in Paris in 1920, before either was famous for the work they are now known for. The house's catalogue of Schiaparelli's artist collaborations files six or seven works under Man Ray's name, including the spiral spectacles made for her and portraits of the couturière; the Musée des Arts Décoratifs lists him first among her key collaborators.
Partner of · 1929–1932
Miller arrived in Paris in 1929 and became, in the Lee Miller Archives' words, Man Ray's 'student, model and partner'; they worked together in his Montparnasse studio until she left Paris for New York in 1932. The V&A credits the solarisation technique to the two of them jointly.
Collaborated with · 1925
Tanguy and Man Ray jointly made an exquisite-corpse drawing with Joan Miró and Max Morise in Paris in 1926–1927.
Met · 1924–1929
Crowley and Man Ray belonged to the overlapping artistic and expatriate networks of interwar Montparnasse; Churton describes their relationship as one of camaraderie during Crowley's Paris years.
Influenced by · 1926
Man Ray lived on Atget's street and collected almost fifty of his photographs into an album dated 1926. What he took from them was the uncanny in plain documentary: shop windows where reflections double the street, mannequins that look about to move, empty staircases. He published several in La Révolution surréaliste, among them Atget's photograph of a crowd watching the 1912 solar eclipse, in the issue of 15 June 1926. Atget asked that his name be left off, saying they were simply documents he made.
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